


The Systematic Classification of Experience

by tofty



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-25
Updated: 2011-03-25
Packaged: 2017-10-17 06:22:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/173851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tofty/pseuds/tofty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holmes is the most purely rational creature in existence.  Except when he's not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Systematic Classification of Experience

**Author's Note:**

> Written for kickthebeat, who requested Holmes fic sung to the tune of "lonely ain't easy." Written as classic Holmes, but I think it actually works for most values of Holmes/Watson, for those values of people actually called Holmes and Watson, that is.
> 
> There's a single line cribbed from _Young Sherlock Holmes_ , but no knowledge of that movie's needed.

Holmes is the most purely rational creature in existence: he has proved this fact to himself time and again, to his own satisfaction and against the most exacting criteria imaginable. He is unswayed by appeals to emotion, cannot bear maudlin sentimentality. He is not simply on the side of cold science, both pure and applied, but does not, actually, officially recognize the existence of another side.

At night, certainly, the way he falls into Watson bespeaks nothing but the demands of his body. The biology of Watson's strong, sure surgeon's fingers gripped tight around him, of the way the hair at the back of his neck stands on end as Watson breathes over a stretch of skin he's just licked, those things are easily accounted for. He is, at base, an animal, and behaves instinctively as animals do in these situations.

The way he loses himself afterward, though, that is harder for science to explain. He can talk all he wants about biological urges, about the evolutionary instinct of animals to band together in pairs or tribes, but the truth is that his urge to wrap himself around Watson during the darkest hours has little enough to do with science, and much more to do with a certain afternoon's luncheon long ago.

He thinks about it, sometimes, the way he felt, sitting at the table with his schoolmates, the way they sat back, resistant, as he said the words. And from their instinctive universal recoil, one might gather that even then, he'd managed to hit on a matter of biology, but he didn't feel a scientist when he said them then, and he doesn't feel it now, wrapped around John as tightly as he dares, just short of waking him, just shy of something he can't name but knows other people feel. He doesn't dare put a name to it; it wouldn't be a clean name, or a scientific one.

 _I want never to be alone._ It isn't science, to feel the words rising up in his gorge as John rises from their bed, early, to get dressed for the day. It isn't science, to want to drag him back into bed, not for a convenient biological appeasement but simply just to never let go. It isn't science, and so he lets John rise without objection, and he'll never mention it. He can't begin to imagine the expression on John's face if he ever tried to.

But he'll also never stop feeling it.


End file.
